Quotes from Judith Butler

Wittig appears to take issue with genitally organized sexuality per se and to call for an alternative economy of pleasures which would both contest the construction of female subjectivity marked by women's supposedly distinctive reproductive function.

Keiner dieser Aufsätze beabsichtigt, die Materialität des Körpers zu bestreiten; sie stellen vielmehr partielle und sich überschneidende genealogische Bemühungen dar, die normativen Bedingungen zu klären, unter denen die Materialität des Körpers gestaltet und gebildet wird, und insbesondere, wie sie durch differentielle Kategorien des Geschlechts gebildet wird.

It would surely be a mistake to gauge the success of feminism by its success as a colonial project. p41.

there is nothing radical about common sense.

The task thus becomes to track the patterned ways that violence seeks to name as violent that which resists it, and how the violent character of a legal regime is exposed as it forcibly quells dissent, punishes workers who refuse the exploitative terms of contracts, sequesters minorities, imprisons its critics, and expels its potential rivals.

As feminism has sought to become integrally related to struggles against racial and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly important to resist the colonizing epistemological strategy that would subordinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a transcultural notion of patriarchy.

Perhaps also part of what dialogic understanding entails is the acceptance of divergence, breakage, splinter, and fragmentation as part of the often tortuous process of democratisation.

The mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes.

that struggling individual on the brink of collective identity

Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.

subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection

One might wonder what use 'opening up possibilities' finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is 'impossible', illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question.

That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.

In other words, sex is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize 'sex' and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms.

Es gibt kein Ich vor der Annahme eines Geschlechts.

identification is always an ambivalent process. Identifying with a gender under contemporary regimes of power involves identifying with a set of norms that are and are not realizable, and whose power and status precede the identifications by which they are insistently approximated.

If the interdiction against killing rests on the presumption that all lives are valuable—that they bear value as lives, in their status as living beings—then the universality of the claim only holds on the condition that value extends equally to all living beings. This means that we have to think not only about persons, but animals; and not only about living creatures, but living processes, the systems and forms of life.

A]s we know from the increasingly urgent issue of climate change, the environment changes as a result of human intervention, bearing the effects of our own powers to destroy the conditions of livability for human and non-human life-forms. This is yet another reason why a critique of anthropocentric individualism will turn out to be important to the development of an ethos of nonviolence in the context of an egalitarian imaginary.

Materie ist immer etwas zur Materie Gewordenes.

El género no es exactamente lo que uno «es» ni tampoco precisamente lo que uno «tiene». El género es el aparato a través del cual tiene lugar la producción y la normalización de lo masculino y lo femenino

It is one matter to suffer violence and quite another to use that fact to ground a framework in which one's injury authorizes limitless aggression against targets that may or may not be related to the sources of one's own suffering.

El género es] la estilización repetida del cuerpo, una sucesión de acciones repetidas –dentro de un marco regulador muy estricto– que se inmoviliza con el tiempo para crear la apariencia de sustancia, de una especie natural de ser.

The health of the economy was understood to be more valuable and urgent than the health of the people. ... But the transposition of health onto the economy did not just transfer a human attribute to the markets; it literally drained health from living bodies to establish health for the economy. That has been a deadly form of displacement and inversion within the logic of capitalism that comes to the fore within pandemic times.

I don't think, for instance, that you can invoke a Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. You can't say, Oh, I'll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I'll apply myself to the aks, and I'll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me. I think that one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and one finds oneself foiled.